Chapter 3: Introduction to Second Life - Movement and Navigation
Walking and Flying
"Strawberry in Flight" (Creative Commons)
You can move your avatar using your left hand to tap the W, A, S, D, E, and C keys, leaving your right hand free for the camera, gestures, and other controls.
Type W to walk forward, A to turn left, S to walk backward, and D to turn right. Typing E will cause your avatar to jump. A sustained press of E will launch your avatar into flight. While you are flying, you can use C and E to move up and down (as a left hand alternative to page up and page down). You can use a sustained press of C to stop flying.
Of course, some of our residents may prefer to click on the "Move" button along the bottom of the viewer, then select "walk," "run," or "fly" by clicking on the appropriate icon at the bottom of the pop-up window. The navigation arrows are self-explanatory, but residents can get detailed explanations by clicking on the "?" to invoke the Help Browser.
You can override the standard animations in SL with Animation Overrides (AOs). You can use AOs to change how your avatar moves, stands, and gestures. In your Inventory, you will find two main folders for animation: the gestures folder and the animation folder. Gestures are animations for activities such as laughing, pointing, gesticulating wildly... The ones associated with every new account are linked to triggers, often automatically triggering when you type a slash and the gesture's name or say the gesture's name. Within the gestures folder, you can turn a gesture on and off by right-clicking on it and choosing activate or deactivate.
Camera Controls
Your SL viewer has camera controls that let you manipulate your in-world viewpoint. You can zoom out or in to get an overview of an area or examine small details of an object.
Alt + left mouse click - or "alt-zoom" - centers the camera to the cursor. (Please note that on a Mac, you use the command key in place of the Windows "alt.") You can use "alt-zoom" to latch your camera on a moving object so that it pulls the camera along with it.
To pan and tilt, use Ctrl + alt + left click (CTRL-alt-zoom).
For on-screen controls, click View at the bottom of the viewer window. You can use the Camera Controls to Zoom, Orbit, and Pan. On the middle strip, click + to zoom in and - to zoom out. Click the arrows on the left compass to orbit your view around the center of the screen. Click the arrows on the right compass to pan up, down, left, and right.
To reset your camera, press the escape button - esc - twice (or click on View, then Reset View).
Using the Map and Mini-Map
To open your large map to get oriented to your surroundings and locate points of interest, on a Windows PC, press Ctrl-M. You can use Ctrl-Shift-M to open the mini-map.
Web Service APIs: The SL Map API is a client-side set of Javascript functions and objects. You can click anywhere on a Map to open a teleport window. The teleport window invokes the gotoSLURL( ) global function. Clicking on "teleport now" starts the SL viewer and teleports you to the point you selected by clicking on the map.
Teleporting and Landmarks
Residents move throughout SL by teleporting directly to their selected locations. As a web browser uses bookmarks, SL uses Landmarks. A Landmark contains a region name and three positioning coordinates within that region. When you want to share a Landmark outside of Second Life, you can use a Second Life URL, or SLurl, to create a teleport link to that location. Please see http://slurl.com/about.php for more detailed information. For help building your SLurls, seehttp://slurl.com/build.php.
Chapter 3: Introduction to Second Life - Movement and Navigation
Walking and Flying
You can move your avatar using your left hand to tap the W, A, S, D, E, and C keys, leaving your right hand free for the camera, gestures, and other controls.
Type W to walk forward, A to turn left, S to walk backward, and D to turn right. Typing E will cause your avatar to jump. A sustained press of E will launch your avatar into flight. While you are flying, you can use C and E to move up and down (as a left hand alternative to page up and page down). You can use a sustained press of C to stop flying.
Of course, some of our residents may prefer to click on the "Move" button along the bottom of the viewer, then select "walk," "run," or "fly" by clicking on the appropriate icon at the bottom of the pop-up window. The navigation arrows are self-explanatory, but residents can get detailed explanations by clicking on the "?" to invoke the Help Browser.
You can override the standard animations in SL with Animation Overrides (AOs). You can use AOs to change how your avatar moves, stands, and gestures. In your Inventory, you will find two main folders for animation: the gestures folder and the animation folder. Gestures are animations for activities such as laughing, pointing, gesticulating wildly... The ones associated with every new account are linked to triggers, often automatically triggering when you type a slash and the gesture's name or say the gesture's name. Within the gestures folder, you can turn a gesture on and off by right-clicking on it and choosing activate or deactivate.
Camera Controls
Your SL viewer has camera controls that let you manipulate your in-world viewpoint. You can zoom out or in to get an overview of an area or examine small details of an object.
Alt + left mouse click - or "alt-zoom" - centers the camera to the cursor. (Please note that on a Mac, you use the command key in place of the Windows "alt.") You can use "alt-zoom" to latch your camera on a moving object so that it pulls the camera along with it.
To pan and tilt, use Ctrl + alt + left click (CTRL-alt-zoom).
For on-screen controls, click View at the bottom of the viewer window. You can use the Camera Controls to Zoom, Orbit, and Pan. On the middle strip, click + to zoom in and - to zoom out. Click the arrows on the left compass to orbit your view around the center of the screen. Click the arrows on the right compass to pan up, down, left, and right.
To reset your camera, press the escape button - esc - twice (or click on View, then Reset View).
Using the Map and Mini-Map
To open your large map to get oriented to your surroundings and locate points of interest, on a Windows PC, press Ctrl-M. You can use Ctrl-Shift-M to open the mini-map.
Web Service APIs: The SL Map API is a client-side set of Javascript functions and objects. You can click anywhere on a Map to open a teleport window. The teleport window invokes the gotoSLURL( ) global function. Clicking on "teleport now" starts the SL viewer and teleports you to the point you selected by clicking on the map.
Teleporting and Landmarks
Residents move throughout SL by teleporting directly to their selected locations. As a web browser uses bookmarks, SL uses Landmarks. A Landmark contains a region name and three positioning coordinates within that region. When you want to share a Landmark outside of Second Life, you can use a Second Life URL, or SLurl, to create a teleport link to that location. Please see http://slurl.com/about.php for more detailed information. For help building your SLurls, seehttp://slurl.com/build.php.
Continue to Chapter 3: Introduction to Second Life - Communication Tools